Yet he went on, keeping Mike in sight, trying to gain on him-Mike in his dangerous rage and that dark scarecrow of a fellow whose wild face had so touched him. He was dimly `conscious, as he ran, of the horror of the dark alleys through which he was passing, of the filth underfoot in which he slipped and stumbled, of the terrible underworld creatures screaming at them from dark doorways. There was no light in this dreadful place, except the occasional gleam of a guttering tallow candle stuck in a broken window, but the moon had risen and its faint light illumined the two flying figures ahead of him whom he knew he must keep in sight, lest they be lost eternally and he with them. It seemed to him as though the three of them were now alone in the world, for they had outdistanced the others, and the figures in the doorways had seemed no more than phantoms. He fell into a heap of refuse, picked himself up, and went on. And now the fear was leaving him, burnt up by some fire that had been lit in him. The blood Howed warmly through his limbs again, and his mind was clear.
The end of it all came with surprising suddenness. They reached what seemed the end of an alley, blocked by a door in a wall, and the one dark boy who was yet all the vagabonds of the world flung himself against the door. He had expected it to give way but someone had apparently bolted it upon the other side. He leaped back and Hung himself against it again, but uselessly. There was no more he could do. He was half-starved, and had not the strength of his pursuers, but he turned with his back to the door and faced them, his lists ready. The bull-roarer and the purse he had stowed away in the pockets of his ragged breeches, though grimly aware that the pockets had holes in them. His back was to the door and he would die before he gave them up of his own will.
"Let him alone, Mike!" yelled Zachary. "Damn you, let him alone!"
But Mike’s particular demon of hellish anger had got him and would not let him go. He looked back once over his shoulder and Zachary saw his face beneath the red hair, scarlet with drink and hate and rage, and the murderous look in his eyes that made him seem a stranger. It was useless. He’d kill the other fellow if he could. He leaped, but Zachary leaped quicker and was between the two of them, the dark boy knocked backwards between his own body and the door.
Mike saw a dark, lean face confronting his own, was sent staggering by the blow of a fist on his jaw, and for a moment or two did not grasp the fact that it was Zachary he was lighting and that his real opponent had vanished. When he did grasp it the realization that it was Zachary who had robbed him of his quarry and given him that blow on the jaw, added bitter hurt to a rage that had long ago passed beyond his control. His blows came so thick and fast that Zachary was once more gripped by panic. "Stop it, Mike!" he gasped. "Mike! It’s me, Zachary. Mike!"
But it was no good. There was nothing he could do now except fight for his life. His panic steadied, and he fought. The moon had risen clear above the alley and the light was not too bad. He was not Mike’s equal as a fighter, but he was sober and Mike was not, and he had had the benefit of the miller’s training. He was aware of a ring of spectators ’round himself and Mike, of yells of encouragement, of whistling and stamping, hoots and groans. He thought vaguely that he was back again on the wrestling green near Torre fighting Sam Bronescombe. Somewhere in the crowd his adopted father was watching. He must acquit himself well in this fight for the underdog against the bully, or the doctor would not allow him to go home. He had quite forgotten now that he was fighting Mike-Mike, whom he had stayed in London to protect.
3
And Mike was lying at his feet with his head in a pool of blood, untidily, his arms and legs flung just anyhow, as he had seen dead men lying on the deck of the Victory before they were Hung overboard. Mike was dead. His eyes were shut and his face was a greenish-gray color in the moonlight. Mike was dead, and he had killed him. While he fought he had been deaf to what was happening about him. He had not heard the shrill whistle and the sound of pounding feet as the roughs lied before the approach of the officers of the watch. He realized now that it was very quiet. The boys. who had devoured steak and onions with him and Mike had disappeared. There was no one here but himself and Mike and the officers of the watch.
“I killed him," he said quietly as the handcuffs snapped round his wrists. "I killed him so that he should not kill the other fellow."
He did not look at any of them, he only looked at Mike. Even when they were taking him away down the alley he still saw only Mike, and the voice in his head was talking to him. I couldn’t let you kill him. You’d hate to kill a half-starved fellow who’d never had a chance. You only went for him because you were in one of your rages and didn’t know what you were doing. You’d have been sick about it afterwards, if you’d killed him. I had to stop you. I had to, Mike. What else could I do?
Then he was lying on the floor of some dark and filthy conveyance, lying as he had been flung, bumping along over the cobbles. There were three other men and a woman with him. The woman was sobbing and one of the men was swearing, but the other two were quiet. He was still staring at Mike’s face with its closed eyes. That was odd. Dead men’s eyes were always open, until someone closed them, and no one had closed Mike’s eyes. His wits were beginning to return and for a full five minutes he saw not Mike’s face but the huddled shapes of the sobbing woman and swearing man, and the two who were quiet. He pushed himself up from the floor by his hands and heard the clink of his chains. So they were going to prison. "For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me." He had been told about the London prisons. They were places of unspeakable filth and horror, and you got flung into them for any sort of offense, debt, stealing, manslaughter, anything; and you waited for your trial for weeks or months. Sometimes they forgot about you altogether. And if they remembered you, it was the law that you were hung for almost everything. His brain reeled. But he had saved Mike from killing that wretched boy, even though it was at the cost of killing Mike himself. But was Mike dead? He did not know. And if they forgot about him in this dark abyss into which he had fallen, he would never know.
CHAPTER IV
1
The moon that had shone upon Zachary’s light with Mike kept Stella awake most of that night in her room at Weekaborough. She was not accustomed to being treated in this way by her friend the moon, but she had the feeling that it was watching something that was happening to Zachary and was trying to tell her about it. When she dropped into restless sleep she saw Zachary once again as the boy from the moon with his bundle on his back, and he was finding it so heavy that he was staggering beneath it.
She got up next morning heavy-eyed and anxious, and not even the thought that it was Sunday, her favorite day in the week, could cheer her up at all. And the news brought to them by Madge at breakfast that Sol, who had kept to his bed for the last fortnight, was more poorly this morning, made her feel more miserable than ever.
Neither she nor Mother Sprigg went to church that morning for they felt too anxious about Sol. Mother Sprigg, after she had made the old man comfortable and formed her own opinion as to his condition, went downstairs to make an apple pie and get on as fast as she could with the hemming of his shroud. She had been busy with this for a week past, putting her most exquisite stitchery into it. No one at Weekaborough thought this morbid of her, merely practical. Sol himself, when told by Madge that he was to have a shroud lit for the king of England himself, had been delighted, had asked to see it, and derived much pleasure from the sight.
Stella, meanwhile, sat by Sol’s narrow bed in the tiny attic that they called "the tallet," with its one small window looking towards Bowerly Hill. It was an attractive little room, made up of odd angles and corners, and hardly bigger than a cupboard. Sol’s bed with its patchwork quilt, a table, and the stool upon which Stella sat almost filled it. It was bright with sunshine and very quiet and peaceful. The mice had worried Sol a little when he first took to his bed, but Stella had removed this worry by placing the mandrake on his windowsill. She had dressed it in
the clothes that had once adorned her rag doll, and it gave great pleasure to Sol. He was often to be heard talking to it and asking it questions, and he either heard or imagined answers which gave him great satisfaction.
He also liked being read to, and Stella this morning sat with the Weekaborough prayer-book open on her lap and read him the prayers and psalms that were at this moment being boomed forth by Parson Ash and the congregation at Gentian Hill. The feel of the prayer-book in her hands, the sound of the words she read, suddenly made her happy again. Sol seemed dozing most of the time, but her happiness seemed to reach him for he smiled as he dozed, and once or twice, when the words that she read rang out with sudden beauty, he opened his eyes and his bright glance met hers as it had used to do when Father Sprigg read the Good Book in the kitchen. This mysterious eternal beauty, speaking through music, clothing itself in color, form, and light yet never itself in its own being seen or heard, how it could lock together two people who suddenly heard or saw in some way that was alike. You could never again feel quite separate from that person. She would remember till the end of her life that she and Sol had felt the same when brightness fell from the air.
2
But away from Sol, the peace and happiness left her and she was miserable again for the rest of the day. And lonely too, for her anxiety about Zachary was not a thing that she could tell to anybody. Father and Mother Sprigg, had she spoken of it, would have told her not to be fanciful.
In the evening some of Father Sprigg’s cronies came in to see him, and the tobacco smoke and the conversation were so thick and loud that she and Hodge escaped out of the kitchen and across the yard to Pizzle Meadow. The evening light lay level and golden across the grass and flowers of the meadow, and the black pigs lying among the crane’s-bill and vetches seemed each to be surrounded by a sort of halo of glowing dust. There was no breath of wind, no sound but the tinkling of the stream as it flowed from the Pisgie’s Well beneath the hawthorn tree in the far corner through the meadow to the trough, and then disappeared underground to feed the well in the yard and the duckpond in the orchard. The meadow sloped upward to the hawthorn tree and Stella climbed with dragging feet, weary and heavy-hearted with sadness for Sol and anxiety for Zachary. Hodge moved beside her, his tail tucked between his legs, sharing her sorrow.
They felt better when they were settled beneath the hawthorn tree, for it was a comforting place to be. The tree was very old, with fantastically twisted roots and widely spreading branches, and the water that welled up from the dark places of the earth, trickled out between its roots and spread into a small round pool fringed with forget-me-nots.
Stella settled herself with her back against the trunk of the tree and her feet in the forget-me-nots, Hodge lying beside her with his chin propped on her ankles. She shut her eyes and listened to the chiming sound the water made as it over-flowed the pool and fell in a cascade over some mossy stones into the stream below. For generations this well had been thought to be especially beloved by the fairies, not the goblin folk who had frightened her in her childhood but the pisgies, the Good People whom Granny Bogan believed had taught her the use of the herbs.
A bell was ringing somewhere, very faintly, as though far away, but clear and persistent, like a voice calling, like that bell that Zachary had rung under the sea. Though she did not open her eyes she was aware of a sudden quickening of consciousness, as though she had slept for a moment and then awakened again. She heard no bell now but only the water falling. Yet she had heard it, and it had been Zachary calling to her in her sleep, as he had called before. She opened her eyes and the golden dust had gone from the air and the shadows were long and blue-fantastic, like the shadows of uight’s lingers stretched out to grasp the world .... Night .... If she could sleep long and deeply, would she dream of Zachary and know why it was that he was calling her?
She slipped her hand into her pocket, and there between her fingers was the muslin bag of rue. She had put it there when she left Torre two days ago, for she always took it with her wherever she went. She remembered that Granny Bogan had said she must soak the leaves in the water of a fairy well and bathe her eyes on the night of the full moon. It would be full moon tonight, and here was the pisgies’ well just beside her. She took out the little muslin bag and opened it, dipped up some of the clear sparklig water into her hollowed left hand, shook some of the rue into it and bathed her eyes.
When she had done it she felt a little uneasy. Was she being very superstitious? What would mon Pere say to such a performance? He would tell her that she ought to go to St.
Michael’s Chapel and pray, as she had done before when she had been unhappy about Zachary. And so she would. She would go tomorrow when she was back at Torre.
Meanwhile was it wrong to invoke the help of the fairies? She was sure it was not, for if they existed, they were Good People and God had made them and given them the charge of the wells, the streams, and the secrets of the herbs and flowers. And the doctor had said once that in this mysterious universe, where humans in their blindness see and know less than one thousandth part of what goes on around them, all creatures exist only that they may interpenetrate and serve each other.
Reassured she got up, curtsied to the well as an act of politeness to the fairies, and ran back with Hodge to the parlor for supper and bed.
3
The next morning Stella sat in the doctor’s gig, the reins in her hands, her basket at her feet. The doctor was inside the farmhouse visiting Sol, but he would be out in a minute and would drive her back to Torre. She had said good-by indoors to Father and Mother Sprigg and Madge, but Hodge sat at the top of the steps scratching himself, for something was biting him, and regarding her anxiously while he did it.
"Only a few days, Hodge, and then I’ll be back again," Stella reminded him. ·
The front door clanged and Dr. Crane came down the paved path between the yew trees, drawing on his driving gloves. He patted Hodge, climbed into the gig beside Stella, and took the reins. They drove at a good pace, cleaving the hot, honey-scented air like swimmers in the foam of some warm blue sea. It was usually such fun, this breasting of the warm air, but today the doctor, looking down at Stella, could see no happiness in her face.
"What is it, Stella?" he asked. "Is it Sol?"
Stella shook her head. "I don’t mind about Sol like I did. I think he’ll like it there. But Zachary doesn’t like it where he is."
"He’s not fond of the sea, certainly, but he’ll soon be home," said the doctor.
"He wasn’t at sea in the dream I had last night," said Stella. "He was in a dreadful place. It was dark because there wasn’t any light, except lantern light that came through a grating high up in the wall, but I could see it was dirty and looked like a sort of dungeon. There were a lot of men there, and it must have been night because some of them seemed trying to go to sleep. But they had scarcely any room to lie down, and no beds, only bits of wood on the floor to put their heads on. Some of them had hardly any clothes, and the rest were in rags, and some of them did not look like men at all."
She broke off and shivered in the hot sunshine, then went on again. "Zachary was there. He wasn’t asleep, because there wasn’t any room for him to lie down. He was sitting leaning against the wall, just under the grating, and the wall was slimy. I could see the slime shining in the light that came through the grating, and I could see Zachary’s face. It was bruised, and one eye was shut up, as though he had been Hghting, but it wasn’t the bruises that made it look so dreadful."
"What was it?" asked the doctor.
"The look on his face. He was afraid. He looked like the picture of Christian in Mrs. Loraine’s Pilgrim’s Progress, when he was shut up in prison in the City of Destruction, and I saw right into his heart, and I knew what he was thinking and feeling. He thought he would never get out. He was afraid he would go mad. And he wanted you and me very badly, but he knew that there was no way that he could tell us where he was. I tried to call out to him that I was the
re, but my voice wouldn’t come out of my mouth. And I tried to run to him but my feet wouldn’t move. Then I woke up."
"You had a nightmare," said the doctor. "What did you have for supper? Rabbit pie?"
"Milk and bread and honey. And it wasn’t a nightmare. I’d bathed my eyes with rue and the water from the pisgies' well, like Granny Bogan told me to do if I wanted to see into my lover’s heart."
"So Zachary is your lover, is he?" asked the doctor lightly.
"Yes. He loves me," said Stella. ".Sir, where is he?"
"At sea in his frigate. You had a nightmare."
"No. I bathed my eyes with the rue."
"All the tarrydiddle that Granny Bogan told you was just a fairy tale, my honey."
"Fairies are true, and what they tell you is _true," said Stella.
"That’s a matter of opinion! And now listen. If any disaster had happened to Zachary, I should have been told. The authorities have my name as his adopted father. But no disaster has happened to Zachary. You had a nightmare. Too much new bread and honey is very indigestible, as I’ve told you before."